Such is the fate of plays which deal seriously with serious subjects. "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." The playwrights felt tragedies, but the audience insisted upon comedies. O' Casey calls his plays tragedies, but they are played and accepted as comedies. - Malone on new playwright, 1926, N.Y, Theatre Magazine
THE two longer plays are tragedies of disillusionment; they were played and accepted as comedies of errors. [...] Juno and the Paycock is modern tragedy at its best, almost at its greatest. [...] Juno and the Paycock has its superficial qualities verging upon the melodramatic, but it is lifted and ennobled by the character of Juno. Juno is the greatest, the universal mother, as great as the greatest mother in drama, even though her sphere of influence be limited to two rooms in a tenement house in a Dublin slum. The tragic significance of Mrs. Alving in Ghosts is small when compared with the tragic significance of Juno. Her son dead "for his country"; her daughter betrayed by a worthless liar and deserted by a coward; her husband a boasting, drunken, lying wastrel, she rises superior to her slum surroundings and prepares to begin her life struggle anew. - ibid
Nevertheless Juno is a great play, in the first rank of its kind, and if O' Casey's genius be great enough and strong enough to equal it, or to surpass it, in the future the praise may be justified. - ibid.
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Bound by the traditions of men which artificially separate comedy and tragedy, the critic, like the Greeks, fails to recognize the tragi-comic mixture which is the hallmark of experienced human life and is recognized as such by the common sense that men are endowed with. Tragedy and comedy are perceptions of human inconsistency. In children, inconsistency is comic. In grown-ups, it is tragic. As viewed by the wise, it is both.
The greatness of Juno as a mother is enhanced, not diminished, by her fervent prayer, after the death of her son to the "mother of God", pleading that the killing be stopped.
Luke 2:34-35 KJV And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, […] (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) […]
